Will this run blender?


Will this run blender?

That box you see above? It’s a quad-core ARM-based PC running Ubuntu called Utilite. The desktop system, made by Compulab, will be available next month starting at $99. While there are plenty of Android dongles built on ARM SoCs out there, few (if any) can truly offer a PC-like experience. The company – best known for its Trim Slice, Fit-PC andMintBox products – wants to change this.

Utilite packs a single-, dual- or quad-core Freescale i.MX6 Cortex-A9 MPCore processor (up to 1.2 GHz), up to 4GB of DDR3 RAM (1066MHz), an mSATA SSD (up to 512GB), WiFi b/g/n, Bluetooth 3.0, HDMI and DVI-D outputs, two Gigabit Ethernet sockets, four USB 2.0 ports, one micro-USB OTG connector, audio jacks (analog and S/PDIF), a micro-SD XD slot and two ultra-mini RS232 interfaces – phew!

Rounding things up is support for OpenGL ES, OpenVG and OpenCL EP plus multi-stream 1080p H.264 on-chip decoding. All this fits in a chassis mesuring just 5.3 x 3.9 x 0.8 inches (135 x 100 x 21mm) and only consumes 3-8W using a 10-16V supply (unregulated). Those are impressive specs for the price, and the system sure looks positioned to compete favorably with some of the x86 boxes out there.

ARM processor and only OpenGL ES support, so no.

Even it it could, you wouldn’t want to. I’ll never understand why so many in the Blender community want to push for the lowest tier hardware possible. 3D is not a job/hobby for low end hardware.

Regardless, I really would like to see the ARM coalition jump into making chips for PC’s that are far more powerful than the ones for mobile (if not only for the reason to start another high-stakes performance race that would force Intel to pursue massive increases in chip processing power like seen a decade ago).

Cycles can indeed be optimized to become many times faster for complex scenes, but not to the point where CPU renders of such scenes take only seconds.

That ARM processor in it has me wondering if it could or not, I know the kernal android devices was close enough to the Ubuntu kernal that you could boot strap Ubuntu to early tablets and it would often run decently. But the reduced instruction set of ARM processors has me wondering If blender would run and how much of blender would function on it.

You might want to look into something with an atom processor if you are looking for something with comparable power usage and size. ARM processors get their lower power usage by using a reduced instruction set and related components. Atom processors are in the 86X family. As for if that machine you linked will or will not run blender I would have to call that a “Good Question” And please keep me updated if it does. That is information I tend to find useful for other endevours.

Matt, as a person of western descent, who is accustomed to a certain degree of wealth (and who is keen to keep it that way) I of course support the idea of keeping poor people out of CG.

In reality however, we both know that the future of CG creation is massive arrays of Bangladeshi children, working on computers made out of tin cans. Might I remind you that the critically acclaimed film “Toy Story” was made on computers that are inferior to our modern so-called “smart” watches?

Regular moviegoers (and certainly producers) are barely able to discern the differences in quality between that and whatever crap Hollywood will put out next week. But even if they did, there is still an even larger market for CG junk on TV or Youtube, where the demand for quality is even lower. This market is dwarfed yet by the tons of lowpoly 3D models required for the mobile game industry. Need those be modeled on a high-end rig? I don’t think so.

The message is clear guys, if you don’t want to work for scrap like a Bangladeshi child, get some education for a real job, stay out of CG.


Now, to answer the original question: Blender will likely eventually run on these devices in some form. The main problem is the requirement of OpenGL ES, which should be solved when “Viewport FX” is finished sometime around 2018. Then there’s the question whether any of Blender’s many many dependencies contain any nonsense that makes it non-portable (such as inline asm or little-endianness requirement). A properly written C/C++ program should compile to any instruction set for which there is a suitable compiler.

Snark aside, demanding that Blender run on every device under the sun only wastes the time of developers. Supporting things like ARM and decade old hardware doesn’t come for free, and I stand by my point that cutting edge CG isn’t the hobby for you if you can’t afford the requisite hardware. Just like my hobby isn’t tuning high end sports cars or breeding racing horses, because I can’t afford it. Old versions of Blender aren’t going anywhere, but with every release people seem to want support for more and more of these “shoestring” computing platforms (This, RaspPi, countless other ARM platforms). Old version of Blender aren’t going anywhere, and you’re free to use them if you won’t/can’t upgrade for any number of reasons, but asking for a high end, compute intense package to run on what is essentially a phone isn’t doing anyone any favors, and even if it worked, would only lead to frustration. This isn’t an elitist point of view, this is a realist point of view. Of course I’d like it if everyone in the world could get into CG, but the fact is we have enough users using ancient hardware that devs bend over backwards to continue supporting as is without the added burden of people asking for support on relatively exotic platforms that would only spawn more complaints about speed and corner case errors. Blender can either grow competitively in terms of a modern feature set, or it can seek to be a package for low end hardware. It can’t be both, not with the number of developers available.

Moved from “General Forums > Blender and CG Discussions” to “Support > Technical Support”

Matt, this is a completely false dichotomy. Taking “Viewport FX” into account, porting Blender to ARM is not much more work than supporting other fringe platforms with terrible OpenGL support, like Mac OS.

If there is any point to Viewport FX at all, it is getting an abstraction layer for OpenGL into place. From that results the low-hanging fruit of an Android port, which has been planned for a long time. You can add to that the plan of the dear leader to create an entry-level version of Blender called “Blender 101”. All these signs point to Blender support on ARM/Android.

There is very little “high-end” about Blender, if you disregard Cycles, which is only “high-end” because Path-Tracing was considered too expensive for most of the nearly 30 years since it has been introduced. It’s still too expensive for most Blender users, at least for animations. Yet, most of what you do in Blender does not require (or even use) a fast CPU or GPU. These ARMs are not as slow as you think.

Nobody is asking to support everything. What will happen is that Blender will get (at least half-assed) support for another major platform, which is ARM. That’s consistent with everything Blender has ever been.

Er… BA actually has a number of members from the third world who are using Blender with no problem on old machines (the only difference is that they use BI more). I have also not heard of any interest from Ton in restricting use of Blender to those with the latest hardware (recommended specs. have been bumped recently, but it still accounts for a lot of old machines).

Also, BeerBaron is correct that the Viewport FX project will ease the ability of Blender to work on a platform like Android, I also heard Ton talking about his support for Blender’s eventual arrival on mobile Android devices as the performance continues to increase along with getting things like keyboards.

Minimum specs are here – http://www.blender.org/download/requirements/